Under the shadow of lawsuits, Amiga development marches on

While the future of new Amiga hardware remains in limbo pending the resolution …

While wading hip-deep in nostalgia for the the next installment of our Amiga History series (the next installment is currently scheduled for December 9), there have been some recent developments in the modern-day Amiga market. Yes, there is a modern-day Amiga market, although some of its major players seem bent on making sure there isn't one.

Amiga, Inc. and Hyperion still mired in OS4 lawsuit

Amiga, Inc., the company that split off from Commodore IP holders Gateway back in 2001, is still in the midst of an interminable lawsuit filed against Hyperion Entertainment, the game porting company and third-party contractor that developed Amiga OS 4.0. The details of the lawsuit are extensive—and frankly, somewhat tedious—but the short version can be boiled down to this: Hyperion wants to use an "escape clause" in its OS4 contract that stipulated that it would own the rights to OS4, including the source code, if Amiga, Inc. went bankrupt before OS4 was completed. Amiga, Inc. actually did run out of money in 2004, but was then purchased wholesale by a new company called KMOS, which then changed its name back to Amiga, Inc. in 2005. The new Amiga, Inc. claims this means it never went bankrupt, while Hyperion claims the opposite.

The lawsuit also hinges on the exact definitions of "released" and "available" and even references one of my Ars articles as a piece of evidence in the official court documents. While I'm honored to be included in the Amiga saga, I would much rather that this lawsuit had never existed in the first place.

Until this dispute is resolved, OS4 cannot be sold with new PowerPC-based hardware, such as the recently-released Sam440EP, nor with the (currently vaporware) new PPC products announced by Amiga, Inc. itself. However, there is a market in which Hyperion can still legally sell OS4, which will hopefully keep the company going until this agonizing lawsuit is concluded.

Hyperion releases OS4 for Classic Amigas with PPC accelerators

Last weekend, in conjunction with distribution partners ACube Systems, Hyperion officially announced the public availability of OS4 for Classic Amigas with PowerPC acceleration boards. The operating system supports the venerable Commodore Amiga 1200, 3000, 3000T, 4000, and 4000T models, as long as they have any accelerator card that contains a PowerPC chip.

Amiga OS4 for Classic Amigas

Most of these PPC accelerator boards were released in the years just after Commodore went out of business, and they were designed to work as a giant "calculating coprocessor" for applications that needed extra CPU power that the 680x0 just couldn't provide. Exact sales numbers for these boards have never been released, but tens of thousands of units appear to have been sold. Many have been sitting idle in recent years as owners have been waiting for the release of an OS that would fully support the PPC.

Hyperion and ACube claim that orders for "OS4 for Classic Amiga" have been twice as high as expected, indicating that there are still many dormant Amiga users out there who would love a chance to get back to their favorite platform. But for those people without Amiga PPC hardware in any form, there are still other options.

AROS open-source AmigaOS replacement released in 64-bit version

Development of AROS, the Amiga Replacement Operating System, began in 1995, a year after the Commodore bankruptcy. Back then the future status of the Amiga was very much up in the air, and people were looking for options in case the worst happened. The goal was to build an open-source replacement operating system that had the same feature set as AmigaOS 3.1, the last release by Commodore. The idea was to make it binary compatible when run on classic Amiga hardware, and source code compatible when run on new hardware (primarily Intel-based PCs).

Progress on AROS has been slow, and the OS is still missing many key features that are necessary for it to be useful on a day-to-day basis. A TCP/IP stack is now available, however, and a Webkit-derived browser is in development for AROS. There is also the problem that applications need to be recompiled to run on AROS: many popular Amiga applications such as the amazing word processor FinalWriter are closed-source. Still, some new application developers (such as the creators of the multimedia presentation application Hollywood) have been compiled for AROS.

The big news with AROS is that the developers have just succeeded in compiling and running it natively on 64-bit x86 chips such as the AMD Athlon 64 and Intel's Core 2 Duo processors. Running in 64-bit mode helps the developers track down unusual bugs, and for end-users it promises new memory protection routines to increase the stability of the system.

You can't keep a good OS down

Sometimes it seems like the story of the Amiga is doomed to perpetual cycles of hope dashed by tragedy, but the sheer indomitability of Amiga fans proves that the tale will continue for at least a bit longer. What compels Amiga users to hang on to their favorite operating system despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles and setbacks? As the jazz man once said, if you have to ask, you ain't ever gonna know.